However, there is one amendment to the Report Stage of the Bill
which I have tabled for next week around which opponents and supporters of the
principle of same sex marriage can all rally. It addresses a real inequality
that will be created if the Bill becomes law. A specially commissioned opinion
poll coming out over the weekend indicates strong support for the change across
the House and outside the House. That change is to extend civil partnerships to
opposite sex couples.

If same sex marriage becomes law, then gay couples will have
the choice either to go for the newly acquired right to marry or to join a new
civil partnership or maintain an existing one. Conversely opposite sex couples
will only have the option to marry, albeit in a wider range of religious or
civil institutions. A Bill which is being pushed through (wrongly in my view)
as an equality measure will therefore actually create a new and substantial
inequality.

Tim Loughton is the Member of Parliament for East Worthing and Shoreham, and was Parliamentary Under Secretary for Children and Families from 2010 until 2012. Follow Tim on Twitter.

Are you or have you ever been a homophobe seems
to have become the new McCarthyism of our age? Given the urgency and frenzy of
the lobby pushing forward the Gay Marriage Bill you wouldn’t think that no one
had actually been able to give it a democratic mandate at the last election. At
the evidence sessions of the committee which has just finished scrutinising the
legislation Labour MPs tore into the Catholic Bishops as if they were
prosecutors at a war crimes trial.

If you are not in favour of gay marriage then
clearly you must be against equal rights for gay people so the flawed logic
goes. Being an enthusiastic supporter of civil partnerships legislation and the
full equality in the eyes of the law that it brought for same sex couples back
in 2004 is not good enough apparently. Gay marriage has become this season’s
new black and if you have a problem with that then you are written off not just
as a fashionista lightweight but a full-blown bigot. The irony of the
intolerance this demonstrates on the part of those pushing for greater
tolerance of those with a different sexual orientation is not lost on many.

It is the ‘if you are not actively for
some specific measure then you must be positively against the cause’
mentality that has become the hallmark of the thought police that we
increasingly have to look out for over our shoulders to avoid coming a cropper.
It is also the fuel for one of the most insidious and destructive forces at
work in society today, namely political correctness. It can affect MPs in no
less a way than our constituents. Indeed there are some cases where we are more
vulnerable prey as my debate in the Commons last week showed.

Tim Loughton is the Member of Parliament for East Worthing and Shoreham, and was Parliamentary Under Secretary for Children and Families from 2010 until 2012. Follow Tim on Twitter.

Inevitably, this week’s headlines have been dominated by the
controversial vote over gay marriage the media’s delight at being able to trot
out the usual hackneyed clichés about Tory Party splits. That conveniently
ignores the fact that this was a free vote on a conscience issue and inevitably
Conservative MPs, and indeed those from other parties, will have differing
views and will be accountable to their own constituents.

Lost in the melee of last Tuesday was the Children &
Families Bill unwisely published on the same day. I say unwisely because it contains some
really good legislation about improving support for getting more children
adopted, shared parental leave and crucially shared parenting. And I
narcissistically say good stuff because it reflects the culmination of issues I believe in passionately and had been
working on for years as Children’s Minister and previously in Opposition.

The groundbreaking clauses on shared parenting confirm that
the Government is to press ahead with changes long discussed by my party which
will add a ‘presumption of shared parenting’ to the Children Act 1989. This
delivers on a manifesto commitment Conservatives first made in 2005 and I tried
to carry through with amendments to the Children & Adoption Bill in
Opposition in 2006 only to be frustrated by
the then Labour Government.

Many commentators have lazily referred to the proposed
changes in terms of ‘father’s legal rights.’ It is important to stress though
that this is not about parent’s rights, neither mother’s nor father’s. It is
about children’s rights and expectations and the responsibilities of both
parents to their child.

Tim Loughton is the Member of Parliament for East Worthing and Shoreham, and was Parliamentary Under Secretary for Children and Families from 2010 until 2012. Follow Tim on Twitter.

Dear Prime Minister,

I am writing further to the statement by the Home Secretary earlier this week on the inquiry into the investigations around the North Wales children’s’ homes scandal, and the comments I made from the backbenches.

Just as I congratulated her on the swiftness of her statement to Parliament, I am pleased and relieved that you have also acted urgently and decisively with your own announcement. I know that you personally take these matters incredibly seriously, and it is important that the Government is seen to be on the front foot on the situation and empathetic with the clearly growing concerns of the public.

It is important that the Government is able to provide public reassurance, pointing to the solid foundations in reforming and de-bureaucratising the child protection system which have been a priority since we came into office. In particular, we should be particularly proud of the extensive work carried out in formulating the Child Sexual Exploitation Plan a year ago and, more importantly, the widespread practical measures that are coming about since, as detailed in the Progress Report I published in July. I believe it was the most important piece of work I carried out in my time at the Department and it is essential that it continues to be used and developed as the blueprint of our approach.

National Citizen Service is one of the most exciting youth policies in a generation. The Prime Minister passionately believes in the program’s potential to strengthen and benefit our communities and he is not alone. An impressive list of high profile people have spoken out in support of the initiative including Sir Michael Caine, Dame Kelly Holmes, Amir Khan, Ian Wright and Josh Lewsey. Thousands of young people are now volunteering to play their part and the wider public are ready for a big and bold youth policy idea. An Ipsos Mori survey last summer found that 81 percent of the public approve of the plans to introduce National Citizen Service.

Earlier this summer however, the Education Select Committee produced its report into ‘the provision of services beyond the school/college day for young people, primarily aged 13-25.’ Rather oddly at the time the press release trailing the report was dominated by criticism of the Government’s flagship National Citizen Service. I say odd because NCS is only targeted at 16 year olds and therefore should only account for a small part of this report into youth services.

Tim Loughton MP is Minister for Children and Families at the Department for Education.

Our announcement this week that we are overhauling Government guidance on adoption and stepping up a gear to reverse the trend of falling adoption numbers has been universally welcomed.

Our overriding message has been that adoption works for many children in care for whom there is no safe way back to their birth parents; that we need more people to come forward to offer vulnerable children a permanent and loving home and that this should trump all other considerations around ethnic matching, age and social background; and that we need to remove the obstacles, bureaucracy and political correctness that prevent more children being adopted quicker and sooner.

Parents who make the huge step of knocking on the door of the local authority adoption services department should be welcomed with open arms under a big flashing neon (metaphorical) sign saying ‘Adopters welcome here.’ Is not offering a loving and long term home to an unknown vulnerable child one of the strongest manifestations of the Big Society after all?

Tim Loughton MP is Minister for Children and Families at the Department for Education.

When the Femail section of the Daily Mail opines ‘Children’s Minister Tim Loughton has just earned his place in Heaven’; the Standard refers to ‘a piece of good common-sense’ and the Guardian talks about a possible ‘voice of sanity’ then you know you are on to something.

The reaction to my announcement this week about the urgent need to remove obstacles to adoption was positive, widespread and in some cases surprising. Yet by the end of the week the Guardian had reverted to type with an article comparing my policy as promoting fake controversy in the same terms as Harriet Harman’s ill-judged ‘ginger rodent’ comments and Stephen Fry’s unlikely expertise on the sex life of women. But the debate had well and truly started.

But this debate is not a new one. When I led for the Opposition in scrutinising the Adoption Bill in 2002 one of our major targets was the political correctness which left too many black and ethnic minority children languishing in care in the absence of a ‘perfect’ cultural match. The Adoption Act, as it became, was supposed to be a landmark measure to improve adoption numbers and remove obstacles that were keeping so many damaged children in long term care when many more could enjoy the benefits of a second chance of a stable loving family upbringing that adoption offered.

Eight years on we have seen dramatic rises in the number of children in care, too many of them being shuffled from one temporary foster placement to another and too few of them emerging from care with decent prospects in education, health and life chances generally. Remember, almost two thirds of children in care leave school with no qualifications.

Recent figures showed a worrying drop in the numbers of children who make it into a successful adoption placement yet we know that a child adopted early enough in a strong, safe and stable home has every chance of catching up with those children lucky enough to grow up with their own parents. Most worryingly it is black boys in care who fared worst, taking three times as long to adopt as white children, with many staying in care through to adulthood. And again as we know, statistically too many of them are headed for the youth justice system.

Tim Loughton is Shadow Minister for Children and is one of the MPs taking part in the current Channel 4 series, Tower Block of Commons. Click here to watch the first three episodes and click here to vote for the MP you feel is most connecting with the locals on the estates where they are living.

Two very worrying things happened to me last week, both to do with television.

Firstly I was billed for a fundraising Conservative dinner as "Tim Loughton MP of Tower Block of Commons fame". Thirteen years as an MP, ten of them on the front bench and seven years as Shadow Minister for Children and Young People and glorious recognition boils down to my part in Channel 4’s version of ‘Wife Swap with PMQs.’ From dodgy dancing to cage fighting and rap song recording (that episode was shown last night) I certainly think the whole enterprise of Tower Block of Commons was worthwhile if very hard work. Repeats on Harry Hill’s TV Burp have certainly succeeded in bringing terminal embarrassment to my teenage children.

Being deposited in an unfamiliar environment miles from the comforts of Worthing with no clue about where you are going was always going to be a challenge. Sofa surfing from one flat to the next and not being told which strangers will be your hosts the following night is never easy. When one of your billets turns out to be a one-bedroom flat on the ninth floor of a tower block sharing with two adults, a six year old and four year old hyperactive child, two ex-fighting pit bull terriers, a very territorial cat and two goldfish, you wonder why you are doing this. And when you have a camera in your face for every waking moment for eight days solid you wonder why anyone would want to do it.

But it’s a good way of immersing yourself in a community living on one of the most deprived estates in inner city Birmingham, where no one can name their MP of 26 years’ standing, let alone have met her. The real challenge is to convince people that politicians have any relevance in their everyday lives and that we aren’t all the bunch of ivory towered wasters the popular press would have you believe, particularly of late. But more of the social analysis of what I found and what I learnt in Birmingham Newtown in a later article. More still about the lazy and knee-jerk cynicism of the reviewing print media journalists who are quick to denigrate a worthwhile piece of television like this when it is clear that some of them have not even bothered to watch it in advance.

You have to hand it to Ed Balls: he never misses an opportunity to make a human tragedy into a party political crisis. Last week was another bad week for the Prime Minister's 'mini-me'.

Last Monday, Newsnight revealed the horror of the Edlington torturers case after the full Serious Case Review into the case was leaked to them. The full brutality of what these 10 and 11 year old boys were capable of without any shred of remorse is mind boggling. Barely a year on from the horrors of the Baby Peter case - where Ed Balls echoed the hopes of everyone that lessons would be learned and such cruelty to vulnerable young children must not happen again, especially when that vulnerable child is on the radar of local agencies - here indeed we go again. And again this case involved children who were well known to local children's services, local police and a lot of people in the local community whose families had been terrorised by them.

Most worryingly of what Newsnight revealed was that the full 150-page Serious Case Review which has to be produced by the Local Safeguarding Children's Board, after cases like this, bore little resemblance to the 11-page 'Executive Summary' that accompanied it. One of those pages was the cover. The problem is that the full SCR is not published and available to wider scrutiny, only the summary. We have been here before of course, when the executive summary of the Baby Peter murder proved not worth the paper it was written on and the full SCR was panned and had to be rewritten too.

Commissioned by Doncaster's LSCB, authored by an 'independent expert' and inspected by OFSTED, this is another case of a potentially dodgy dossier the dodgy extent of which only a few chosen people will be in a position to assess. Newsnight had Doncaster and the DCSF bang to rights. Surely in this case above all there should be strong grounds for making a fuller version of the report available to wider scrutiny?

Tim Loughton has been Shadow Minister for Children and Young People since 2003.

This week the Times and Telegraph have covered the news that the ContactPoint database is stalling amid concerns over its safety features.

Contactpoint is a classic Government behemoth. A database which has so far cost £224 million to implement and will cost £41 million a year to run, it is designed to contain all the professional contact details of every one of England’s 11 million children.

Conceived in the aftermath of the Victoria Climbié tragedy in 2003, ContactPoint was part of the Government’s solution to child protection. The other part? The abolition of the tried and tested child protection register. Thus was borne a typically bloated New Labour creation: expensive, unnecessary, but worst of all, unsafe.

Because this Government has displayed the most extraordinary incompetence in its handling of IT projects, it is extremely unlikely that this body of data will be either accurate or secure. The DCSF has, in effect, already admitted this by making provision for some children – the children of celebrities and MPs – to have their data ‘shielded’. This is the loophole that proves the lie: if the Government had any faith in the security of ContactPoint they would not have needed to invent shielding, as it is we will have a two-tier database with one set of rules for a privileged few and another for everyone else.

Tim Loughton is MP for East Worthing & Shoreham and Shadow Minister for Children.

This week we published an update to ‘No More Blame Game’ - the report by the Conservative Party Commission on Social Workers which I chaired and which we published in October 2007. It was a well received green paper on how to improve the standing and image of social workers as an essential component of effective child protection.

The latest report follows a series of high profile deaths of young children failed by children’s services departments and it makes important recommendations about the urgent changes we need to make. At the heart of our proposals is a plea for an end to interminable structural change and a bid to unshackle child protection social workers and other key professionals from paperwork and computer box ticking where assessment nightmares like the Integrated Children’s System mean that many social workers spend up to 80% of their time on the bureaucracy in the office and precious little quality face to face time with the vulnerable families and children they went into the profession to protect.

We want to see an overhaul of the inspection system which failed so badly in Haringey with inspectors actually going out with caseworkers, just as they would sit in a classroom and monitor teachers. We advocate better on the job ongoing training for front line staff and senior managers, proper inter-agency working and a high profile recruitment campaign that includes a new ‘super-breed of social workers ‘Care First’ based on the highly successful ‘Teach First model’. Specifically we have called for greater transparency when things go wrong by automatic publishing of Serious Case Reviews suitably anonymised so that we can all learn from mistakes made. Disgracefully, Michael Gove and three other privileged Parliamentarians were allowed only a furtive sight of the Baby P review behind closed doors, without pen and paper and sworn to secrecy.